Editors' Picks feeds

This article explains Editors’ Picks feeds, feed guidelines, how to submit, update, and remove a feed, and feed traffic.

You have the opportunity to provide links to original news content you believe represents your organization's best journalistic work and potentially have it displayed in a widget on the Google News homepage or certain section pages. The links we choose are called Editors’ Picks.

Benefits

We believe that Editors' Picks can help readers follow their favorite news sources and discover new sources more easily. Readers can express preferences for sources they like and dislike. Sharing interests helps readers build a more direct relationship with publishers.

How it works

To participate in Editors' Picks as a publisher, create and submit a custom feed. To be considered for Editors' Picks, your publication must already be included in Google News.

Each publisher can add one Editors' Picks feed to our homepage. If you’ve already added your publication's homepage feed, you won’t see the Add Editors' Picks button. Additionally, section-based Editors' Picks are available for several of our sections in the U.S. edition. Learn more about section-based Editors’ Picks.

The Editors' Picks feature is currently offered in over 35 Google News editions. If you don't see the Editors' Picks section for a specific edition, it’s not offered in that country. We plan to add this feature to more editions over time, so check back soon.

If you’re participating in Editors’ Picks, you can also promote your iOS or Android app below your feed. That promotion can appear on the Google News homepage and app. Learn more about how to direct users to your apps.

General feed guidelines

Before you submit an Editors’ Picks feed, review the general guidelines below:

We only accept news content for Editors' Picks. Ideally, your picks reflect the best pieces of journalism on your site at any given time. Do not include links to subscription offers, how-to articles, stock quotes, classified ads, weather forecasts, etc.

We require a logo image to be linked in the feed. The image must follow these specifications:

Image dimensions must match one of 2 options:

Option 1: Height between 20 px and 40 px, width of 250 px

Option 2: Height of 40 px, width between 125 px and 250 px

Image must be .png format

File size should only be as large as necessary, i.e. just a few KBs

Logo background should be transparent

Avoid any whitespace around the logo

Add at least one additional item to the feed every 48 hours. Feeds not updated at all within the last 48 hours won't be shown to users. Individual items in the feed can be older than 48 hours, as long as at least one item in the feed has been recently updated. Ideally, the feed would be updated once or twice per day.

We recommend that you provide an author name for each article. If you skip the <dc:creator> (RSS) or <author> (Atom) tag, expect to see the byline of "<Publisher> Staff." The formatting you use will be reflected on Google News, so we ask that you use standard capitalization and hyphenation for author names. For example, you should use "John Smith" rather than "JOHN SMITH." You do not need to include the word "by" within the <dc:creator> or <author> tags.

Technical feed guidelines

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?><rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"><channel><link>http://www.link_to_channel.com</link><description>Description of the channel (e.g., News Site's best articles of the day)</description><title>News Site's editor's picks</title><image><url>http://www.link_to_logo_image.png</url><title>text to use as alternative for the image</title><link>http://www.link_pointed_to_by_the_image.com</link></image><item><title>Headline for first article</title><link>http://www.newssite.com/long-island/first-article-1.2654166</link><description>Some details</description><dc:creator>Author name</dc:creator></item><item><title>Headline for second article</title><link>http://www.newssite.com/second-article-1.2654350</link><description>Some details</description><dc:creator>Author name</dc:creator></item><item><title>Headline for third article</title><link>http://www.newssite.com/third-article-1.2654952</link><description>Some details</description><dc:creator>Author name</dc:creator></item><item><title>Headline for fourth article</title><link>http://www.newssite.com/fourth-article-1.3732094</link><description>Some details</description><dc:creator>Author name</dc:creator></item><item><title>Headline for fifth article</title><link>http://www.newssite.com/fifth-article-1.2654358</link><description>Some details</description><dc:creator>Author name</dc:creator></item></channel></rss>

Additionally, we recommend that publishers give us the following information:

If you submit an Atom feed, you can provide the article link either in the link tag (i.e. link href="http://www.newssite.com/article" rel="alternate" type="html/text") or the <content> tag. Be consistent for each entry throughout the feed. If you use both, we'll extract the article URL from the link tag.

If there are issues with your feed, a message will appear explaining the error. Otherwise, your feed URL is saved and sent to our team for final review. If your feed meets our guidelines, we’ll start crawling it. We may re-review or disable your feed at any time pending our quality measure and user feedback.

How to update your feed

If you need to update your Editors' Picks feed URL, follow these steps:

Make sure your new feed is compliant with the general and technical feed guidelines.

How to remove your feed

Click the checkbox next to the Editors' Picks feed that you’d like to delete.

Click Delete active near the top of the screen.

Within a few days, we’ll stop crawling your feed. You have one week to change your mind before the deletion becomes permanent. If you change your mind after that point, you can re-submit your feed.

Feed traffic

To help you determine how much traffic you get from Editors' Picks, we’re adding the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) parameter google_editors_picks=true to the URLs in your feed. Your webmaster can view your traffic in Google Analytics using that parameter. Learn more about destination goals.